Review: The Man in Lower Ten

The Man in Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Never did a book so deserve my "plot-relies-on-coincidence" tag. Coincidences are everywhere, which quickly undermined my confidence that the resolution wouldn't be some kind of cheat. It isn't, at least not in that sense (more about that later).

It's as if the author only allowed herself a certain number of cast members, so she had to keep connecting them to each other and having them encounter each other in different coincidental ways. For example: the narrator, a lawyer, travels from Washington to Pittsburgh to show an industrialist some evidence in a case they're both interested in and get his deposition about it. While there, he sees a picture of the industrialist's granddaughter, who also happens to be the lawyer's partner's girlfriend, and who the lawyer also happens to meet on the train back to Washington, where an employee of the industrialist is murdered. The lawyer partners later go out to dinner, and randomly see the defendant they're proceeding against in the case I mentioned before. The narrator's life is spared twice by coincidences, too, which do at least also create complications for him.

Having said that, the prose is smooth and assured, so much so that the author can have the narrator say "I'm not an experienced storyteller, I'm telling this in the wrong order" and actually be using that to increase the tension with foreshadowing. Apparently she was known as the founder of the "had I but known" style, and there's plenty of it here.

As a pre-World War I American gentleman (he owns polo ponies and also rides to hounds), the narrator is, of course, excessively solicitous of ladies, especially but not solely ones he happens to be attracted to, and so does some stupid things in the name of not dragging his love interest and her secrets into the light. He reminded me very much of the narrator of Anna Katharine Green's The Leavenworth Case in that regard. There must be scope for present-day authors to use the current sense of what's Not Done as a similar delaying factor in the resolution of their plots, though you'd probably get caned for it on social media given who has the strongest sense of things being Not Done in our time.

I never did get straight whether the murder victim was the intended one or whether he was murdered by mistake, and it kind of doesn't matter given other (coincidental) events surrounding the murder. We find out the murderer not by the work of the amateur detective, but by someone turning up and confessing to their role in events, which to me is an unsatisfying way of resolving a murder mystery. It's as if the author is saying that the murder was only a way of driving the plot, that it's the struggles and interactions of the characters, including the wrongly accused (the narrator, though he never actually gets arrested), that are the story, and the solution of the mystery is just something that has to be delivered because it's expected; the investigation is not the story, and the detective is not the protagonist. I've read a couple of other books like this ( The Terriford Mystery and The Phone Booth Mystery: A Traditional British Mystery , and I find them disappointing. This one has other strengths, which partly make up for that disappointment, but only partly.

Well written, but structurally disappointing, because of the coincidences and because solving the mystery isn't really the main plot.

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